Hot water - convert from oil to electric?

They are common elsewhere, but not in NYC, but we swear by oil-fired hot water heaters. The difference in recovery rate is dramatic. If a gas or electric water heater uses up the stored capacity, it starts trying to make more. But they are unsuccessful due to their limited … recovery rate. OTOH, oil-fired (separate small oil burner on 50 or 75 gallon tank) can almost make new hot water as fast as it is used. Certainly if the newest shower after the 50 gallons is used up is “throttled back”, the hot water is unlimited. I have one of these heaters at my shore house. When a dozen people come back from the beach and all want to take showers, voila!

brucef

in Plumbers and Plumbing 11 years and 6 months ago

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katerube | 11 years and 6 months ago

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I own a two-family house in Brooklyn, and we’re having some issues with consistent hot water for our owners’ unit. It was fine up until a few months ago, when we started experiencing only a few minutes of hot water in showers, then lukewarm water (unless you wait a while for the hot water to kick back in) Anyway, our hot water currently runs off of our oil tank, and I’m wondering if we should convert to a hot water tank powered on our electricity. Would this be cheaper, since the boiler wouldn’t have to fire up in the summer? Are there alternatives we should look into to solve our problem? thanks! Kate

bk1lnite | 11 years and 6 months ago

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Nobody (practically speaking) uses electricity for hot water – it’s much more expensive to heat hot water with electricity than natural gas. Getting a gas hot water heater may be a reasonable solution to your problem. Natural gas is also much cheaper than oil (at current prices and for the foreseeable future) so it’s worth talking to a plumbing and heating contractor to look into converting your boiler to gas as well. You can also get info / quotes for adding an indirect water heater, where you basically heat the water from the boiler and store it in a tank.

katerube | 11 years and 6 months ago

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Correction – yse, I meant to say gas instead of electricity! Converting the hote water from oil to gas. –kate

Augustiner | 11 years and 6 months ago

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YES people use electric water heaters and they are great. But to be efficient you need to choose a **Heatpump** waterheater. Look into Stiebel Eltron Accelera or GE Geospring.

cate | 11 years and 6 months ago

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Sounds like someone should take a look at your current system to see if something is wrong. With boiler-heated water, you should never run out of hot water.

catboot | 11 years and 6 months ago

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Boiler heated water is the worst! In order to heat the water the thermostat had to be way up, so we either roasted in the house, or had to crank up the heat a couple of minutes before taking a shower. We had a gas water heater installed and problem solved.